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“... of Books. She established friendships with Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and W.H. Auden, who went so far as to propose marriage (she declined). Arendt has never inspired universal admiration, however. ‘She seems to me to be inaccurate in argument and to make a parade of learned allusion without any detailed inquiry into texts,’ Stuart ...”

“... usages of a different cultural stratum, those of writers like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and James Joyce (except for most of Finnegans Wake); though virtually no recognition is offered of the problem of using literary sources as evidence for current usage. Unfortunately, the Supplement is not beyond reproach in this respect too. I ...”

“... When​ the posthumous Collected Poems of W.H. Auden appeared in 1976, Seamus Heaney wrote an appreciative review for the magazine Hibernia in which he tolda story about a Ballymena listener calling the BBC one morning in 1969, after the Northern Ireland news had given a lot of coverage to speeches by civil rights leaders the previous evening ...”

“... vote-winner with the folks back home in Kansas. That is one reason why, as long ago as 1962, W.H. Auden said: ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ By these and other measures, the American love affair with science has become even more ardent over recent ...”

“... only common sense.18 March. The York Theatre Royal’s tour of The Habit of Art, the play about Auden and Britten which did well last year and was due to be revived for a festival in New York, has had to be cancelled. I write to the cast apologising and saying that one person who would not be washing his hands every five minutes is W.H. ...”

“... than that of his competitors that winning came fatally easily. Now this is plain to see. W.H. Auden saw it at the time and foresaw the consequences. In January 1942, in a now famous letter, he wrote to Britten: ‘Wherever you go you are and probably always will be surrounded by people who adore you, nurse you, and praise everything you do ... You ...”

“... Achebe as long ago as 1974 and now collected in Hopes and Impediments. In City Without Walls, W.H. Auden included this squib: Even Hate should be precise: very few White Folks have fucked their mothers. A valid point, except that, in a sense, Auden’s plea for precision is vitiated by his easily explained misapprehension ...”

“... and American Poetry. Several writers protested this decision, among them Conrad Aiken and W.H. Auden – the latter going so far as to say that he would leave Random House (his publisher) if Pound’s work were removed from the anthology. The decision to remove Pound was (reluctantly) reversed by Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House. The Random ...”

“... nothing finished.’ The genre can have its successes – we should never forget that, as W.H. Auden put it, ‘Parnassus has many mansions’ – but in the main it is more accurately described by another phrase lifted from Lawrence: ‘the living plasm vibrates unspeakably.’ Such writing has been praised for being ‘groping and semi-articulate, like ...”

“... at least three years.’ She did all kinds of jobs and at 18 studied at the New School with W.H. Auden, who did her the great favour of encouraging her to write the way she talked. She married Jess Paley in 1942, in her late twenties had Nora and a son, Danny, and in her thirties began to write fiction and take part in the political activism that would ...”

“... wholly with it as a poet. In his introduction to the Faber Book of Modern American Verse W.H. Auden pointed out that ‘every American poet feels that the whole responsibility ... has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one, whereas a British poet can take writing more for granted, and so write with a lack of strain and ...”

“... hopes for an audience continent-wide. The poet and his or her reader are inhabitants of what W.H. Auden described in the introduction to his Faber Book of Modern American Verse as ‘a continent only partially settled and developed, where human activity seems a tiny thing in comparison to the magnitude of the earth’. In her more recent Faber Book of ...”

“... enthusiasm – admittedly, for the greater part delivered by personal friends such as W.H. Auden, who proposed marriage to Hannah Arendt shortly before his death. In the Sixties, Hannah Arendt was very Sixties. Her friends in America were of the Left – Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy (her generous literary executor) and Dwight MacDonald – and she ...”

“... probably decide, as I did, that this is a necessary confusion. According to Deborah Baker, W.H. Auden thought of Riding as ‘our only philosophical poet’, but with this exception pretty well no one else who mattered ever took up her case. Baker’s Laura Riding is a strange, complex figure, mediated through many unfamiliar angles, as shattered and ...”

“... greatest friends, was the painter and poet David Jones, whose long poem In Parenthesis W.H. Auden was not alone in thinking the greatest book about the First World War. It emerged after long gestation. Ede, opening his copy when it arrived one morning in 1937, was at once moved to tears. The other artist who, as Ede put it, ‘bound’ his ...”